Musings of an Englishman living in the USA. Job hunting, writing, random thoughts and anything else that strikes my fancy.

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Monthly Archives: December 2013

Well, I kind of got side tracked from keeping up with this blog, unfortunately. All I can offer for that is a mea culpa. I apologize for not keeping my loyal followers abreast of developments in my writing since my NaNoWriMo Day 11 post here.

As you might have gathered from the somewhat pessimistic tone of that entry, my motivation for pursuing further writing, at least as part of the National Novel Writing Month process, had waned considerably. In fact, it would be fair and accurate to say that the loss of those 3,130 words basically destroyed any desire to write I had. Given that, I felt that the inevitable wave of pessimistic “well, yet another 0 word day” posts (all with the “belated posts” tag) for days twelve through thirty of November would be nothing but a drag. Given that, I stopped updating this blog.

However, I forgot to allow for the effects and ego boosts of write-in events hosted by the wonderful Richmond WriMos group. Those people managed to pull me out of the drudgery and despair of NaNo hell most effectively. To prove it, take a look at this chart:

If you can’t read it clearly, that little purple bar reads “WINNER!” (Yes, with both capital letters and the exclamation point. It was kind of a big deal.) I managed to claw past the elusive 50,000 word mark (just barely) and make it to 50,258 words. That’s certainly my smallest total in the three years I’ve been attempting NaNoWriMo but it’s still a win, making me three for three.

The most striking thing about the graph for me is the level of inactivity it shows. After my motivation killing word loss on Day 11, I only wrote a grand total of thirty-eight words towards the novel by November 16th. On the 17th though, I managed to summon up the energy to attend a write in (mostly in the hope of wallowing in pity and commiseration, and because one of my fellow Richmond writers owed me a coffee, which I still haven’t redeemed at the time of writing). Of course, as everyone else was also concentrating on getting their word count back on pace, sympathy wasn’t all that available. What was available was a sounding board to bounce ideas off of, and so I suddenly found the motivation to get 1,289 words written. I also managed to “fantasy cast” the character of Erica Inibha thanks to some judicious usage of Google and IMDB. In my mind’s eye, Erica is now played by Galadriel Stineman.

After that brief flurry of activity, I had yet another 0 word week until the next meeting of the Richmond WriMos on the 24th November.

That one went spectacularly well and I suddenly had another 4,031 words written. That put me other the halfway point with just under 6 days to go. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I figured that, yes, I was going to do this and so my last week of November was one of frenzied writing and weird midnight typing. It turned out to be enough so that when I arrived at the group’s TGIO party, I was done.

Of course, the quality was terrible even by NaNoWriMo standards (there’s a reason there isn’t an excerpt in this post, I do have some standards…) But it was done.

I then resolved to basically turn my writing brain off for a month (which wasn’t supposed to include this blog, but so it goes) and here I am almost a month later with nothing writing-related going on but some brainstorms for a historical fiction series with a tentative title of “A Dynasty Of Rebellion.” Whether that goes further or not, I don’t yet know. If it does, there’s every chance this blog will delve into the process.

As for this blog, it’s became a writing blog, but that wasn’t ever the intention, it was always envisioned as a general purpose blog, and I’m planning to have a new entry at least weekly in 2014 (Hopefully more frequently than that, but the best laid plans never fully work)

Is there anything you would like to see my cover on here in 2014 and beyond?